virtualbox.org

I have downloaded VM and running virtualbox 6.1 but its giving me Guru Meditation critical error occured message. I have used it before but this is happening first time, i already wiped out my older VM and redownloaded this one two times but still the same error popped up while using cuckoo sandbox this time. I have to do my assignment and don't have much time left and TA's have no idea why this error is showing up.

VM RAM is overcommitted:

the log wrote:00:00:03.226842 Host RAM: 7973MB (7.7GB) total, 2722MB (2.6GB) available
00:00:03.379760 Guest OS type: 'Debian_64'
00:00:03.424699 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000100000000 (4 294 967 296, 4 096 MB, 4.0 GB)
19:57:43.791770 PGM: Failed to procure handy pages; rc=VERR_NO_PAGE_MEMORY rcAlloc=VINF_SUCCESS rcSeed=VINF_SUCCESS cHandyPages=0x8

The reason the VM was able to run for 19 hours in this overcommitted condition is because of how Virtualbox handles RAM and how the VM OS handles it.

Virtualbox uses "lazy" RAM allocation. It takes RAM as the VM calls for it. Thus if the VM OS does not call for all its RAM at once the VM can start running well, and once it asks for all its RAM, if the host still has it the VM will continue running well. But if the host doesn't have the RAM when the VM OS asks for it, the little guru meditates.

Linux does not ask for all its RAM at startup. Windows does. So Linux VMs might run for a while with overcommitted RAM, whereas Windows VMs will complain fairly quickly.

To turn lazy RAM allocation off for each VM, so this issue doesn't bring down a seemingly-well-running VM, run this command in the host command line:

cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\Virtualbox"
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/RamPreAlloc" 1

Note this command is per VM, not for the whole Virtualbox installation. Also, consider how much RAM a VM may really need.